Workshop A

Redesigning Courses in the School of Medicine to Promote Flipped Learning and Application in Blackboard Ultra

Molly B Cohen-Osher MD, MMedEd,1 and Priya Garg, MD2

1Family Medicine and 2Pediatrics, Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

Room L-210

In Fall of 2022 the School of Medicine redesigned the pre-clerkship curriculum to promote a flipped and application-based instructional design to foster deep learning, team-work and clinical reasoning. The design included the creation of self-learning guides for content delivery, which included videos, images and text, designed in a thoughtful way by faculty to intentionally help students learn the material. These self-learning guides were housed as self-study documents in Blackboard Ultra and allowed for direct embedding of pictures and videos that could be used by the students. Further Blackboard Ultra enabled students to track what they had and had not yet reviewed to further assist students in learning the materials. A series of self-learning guides are followed by knowledge self-assessment questions for students to complete and IRAT and TRAT questions in the beginning of any Team-Based Learning sessions which were able to be designed and housed in Blackboard Ultra as well. During this session we will provide both the educational rationale for the shift in instructional design, and review how Blackboard Ultra was able to support the creation and delivery of those materials supporting content delivery as well as application. We will also demonstrate the improved user interface of Blackboard Ultra including better navigation for faculty and students, improved accessibility, ease of use on any screen size, including a mobile device and some of the AI tools that are now available to help with site design and question generation. Both representatives from educational technology and the Blackboard Ultra vendor will be present in this session to assist faculty and answer questions.

Target Audience:

Faculty, Staff

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this workshop, learners will be able to:

  • Describe the educational theory supporting a flipped and application model of teaching and learning
  • Explain the functionality of Blackboard Ultra to support a flipped and application-based course
  • Build course materials in Blackboard Ultra
  • Discuss how both this instructional design and Blackboard Ultra can be used for the participant’s own courses

Session Outline:

  • Review the educational theory supporting a flipped and application model of teaching and learning (10 min)
  • Review SOM course design and how it is designed in Blackboard Ultra (10 min)
  • Small group work: Brainstorming how a flipped/application-based can be used in participant’s own course (10 min)
  • Group report out (5 min)
  • Demo of blackboard additional functionality and building in blackboard (15 min)
  • Participants will have an opportunity to go to a sandbox to start building in Blackboard ultra and presenters, EdTech and vendors will circulate to answer questions and help (30 min)
  • Participant report out and Q&A (10 min)